I am in favour of this Bill. I was in favour of the previous legislation as well in the debates that we had in the Seanad when I was a Senator. This is a move forward and an opportunity for the Garda. I want to set a few things straight in the debate. I am conscious that we have CCTV in public places. We have, essentially, surveillance of the populace at large in many places. I actually do not like that. I am not in favour of us becoming like London, for example, which is the most surveilled city in the world and where someone literally cannot cross a street or turn a corner without being monitored by CCTV. That is not a good thing. People might be familiar with the postcard that has the blue plaque on the house where George Orwell lived in London. There is a massive CCTV camera next to it, which is ironic. There is a certain irony to the way the authorities behave with CCTV in London. It is undoubtedly a tool that is used by law enforcement for crime detection and prevention but it is also an unwarranted interference with the privacy of individuals and the right for them to move around. I am not in favour of CCTV everywhere and the notion that citizens should be monitored wherever they go within Dublin or any other city or metropolitan area around Dublin. That does not mean that there is not a place for facial recognition technology and for the technology that is being advocated by this Bill. I have listened to the contributions made by a number of speakers. I am also aware of the commentary from bodies of which I am a member, such as the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, ICCL, and for which I have great respect. They have quite rightly identified lots of the problems that exist with this technology. There is undoubtedly an ethnic and gender bias that comes with this technology. We know that it is more likely to misidentify a person of colour or somebody who is ethnically different to the white population, not even the Irish population. As I understand it most of the these data are based on databases of people who are predominantly white Caucasian individuals from around the world. That is a problem in and of itself. Similarly, it is more likely to misidentify a woman than a man. These are problems absolutely. They should not be glossed over in any way but they are not an argument for not having it and this is where we need to look at how this technology will actually be used. Suffice it to say that once this legislation is passed and if it is to be used, the policy and the parameters put in place by An Garda Síochána for its usage will be absolutely vital for whether it is used correctly, properly and without infringing on the rights of individuals. Let us be clear exactly what it does. This, essentially, is a way in which we can cut down on the sifting through of information by an investigation team. For example, a crime is alleged by an individual or by a group or whatever it is. The investigative arm of the State is An Garda Síochána. They will send out their detectives or their gardaí to carry out investigations, which will include taking witness' statements, looking at CCTV, examining the scene, and gathering any other evidence that might help them in arriving at who they feel is a reasonable suspect. Then the DPP will make the decision on who gets charged, or whatever it is. FRT is a tool to help the Garda in that process. I acknowledge that this technology will, in the course of being used, make mistakes because it is artificial intelligence and it does not have the experience or the intelligence of a person. It cannot be the be all and end all. It cannot be the sole decider of what happens but it can be a tool to help gardaí reduce the time spent sifting through it. When we were debating the previous legislation, the topic de jour was the riots in Dublin in November 2023. There was some amount of video footage gathered by gardaí from individual mobile phones, CCTV within shops, Garda CCTV on the street and CCTV on buses and the Luas, etc. An enormous volume of material was gathered. The way the system worked at the time individual detectives, who are highly trained and highly prized in terms of the time they have available to do their policing work, were sitting down for hundreds of hours watching CCTV footage. Some of this bore no results whatsoever and some of it showed them what they wanted to see. In that circumstance FRT could have been used to search through that footage and save them the time they arguably wasted, though obviously it was part of their investigation and of their duties, looking through all that footage. Would the FRT come back with the result that this is Jim O'Callaghan sitting on the Luas when in fact it is not him at all? Yes, of course. Is it more likely to pick a person of colour and misidentify them? Yes, that is going to happen. However, the important thing is the FRT that does that analysis does not make the final decision on who gets charged or prosecuted. The DPP does but a garda makes the recommendation through the investigation file that goes to the DPP. As such, a human being must be satisfied the result that has been thrown up by the FRT is correct before advancing from that point. The correct highlighting of the fact this technology is fallible and the correct querying of whether it is going to create incorrect results does not mean that cannot be mitigated and we cannot have a situation where a human being is making that analysis for himself or herself, and that is really important. In the debate on the original legislation I likened it to opening a PDF with a thousand pages in it to look for the words "Barry Ward". You press Ctrl and F and search for Barry Ward. From experience, if you search for “Ward” you will get “toward”, “forward” and all the words that include “ward”, so the technology is flawed as it does not get me the right results. However, when I look at that search result I am not looking for “forward” or “toward” but “Barry Ward” and I have the capacity as a human being to distinguish between those incorrect results and the results I am looking for. It is the same for a detective who instead of sitting down to watch 100 hours or 1,000 hours of CCTV can go through and search for the facial characteristics of a person who is being sought, or the other biometric factors that can be programmed into the software. It may well turn up results that garda knows are not correct or, more importantly, that the garda sees are insufficiently accurate or clear. The FRT might throw back an image it says is a given person, but which the garda thinks is not an image of a given person, knows it is not or does not know if it is or not. Leaving to one side that a garda can make that analysis for himself or herself, another two layers of certification go with this. Let us say the garda decides the person the FRT has identified is the suspect and puts it into the investigation file that gets sent to the DPP, which is staffed with highly professional individuals whose job it is to critically analyse the investigation files produced by An Garda Síochána and decide what the result or the actions on that should be, to decide who should be prosecuted, where that person should be prosecuted, for which offences, etc. That person critically analyses what the garda has come up with, so even if the garda has taken for granted the result of the FRT, it is still up to the directing officer in the DPP's office to be happy the garda is correct, or perhaps more importantly, there is an objective basis for saying that is a reasonable result for the FRT, so there is second layer of sifting being done by dispassionate officers who have no skin in the game in terms of the Garda investigation but who have an independent function, jealously guarded by that office, to separate themselves from political pressure, Garda pressure, public pressure or anything like that. DPP officials also have to go through that information. They also have to examine the manner in which the garda arrived at his or her conclusion and decide whether the FRT was correct or was reasonably likely to have been correct. Once that is done and the DPP decides a given person is going to be prosecuted, the evidence then has to be presented before a court, and in almost all these cases, before a jury. There are obviously exceptional cases involving non-jury courts like the Special Criminal Court but they are very much the exception rather than the rule. The vast majority of cases involving this kind of thing will end up before a jury, so 12 ordinary Irish citizens will also have to look at this. They will have to look at the manner in which the Garda made the decision, by which I mean they will look at the CCTV or at the piece of evidence assessed by the facial recognition technology and they will, in accordance with the oath or affirmation they make when they become jurors, satisfy themselves beyond a reasonable doubt the evidence as presented supports the conclusion they are being asked to draw from it. As such, there are three levels of certitude after the FRT makes its analysis and oe would have to expect that is a reasonable basis on which the errors the FRT undoubtedly will make, statistically, can be undone. We are talking about a 5% chance it is going to make mistake, particularly to a person of colour or a woman. However after that, assuming it makes that mistake, the process has to go through three more layers before a person is convicted. I agree with Deputy Ahern, who said an inaccuracy in this regard or mistake in the criminal justice system can lead to serious consequences. I have been practising as a criminal barrister for over 17 years, primarily in defence. I have prosecuted. I do not prosecute now but I still do defence. The primacy of a jury trial and of the principle of innocent until proven guilty is hugely important to me. It is perhaps the most valuable part of our criminal justice system, which ensures that unlike our nearest neighbour we do not have regular certificates of miscarriage of justice. Our criminal justice system take that principle of innocent until proven guilty really seriously, as I do. It is part of my commitment to the job I do in that regard. Of course inaccuracy can lead to serious problems. Anybody incorrectly convicted of any crime in this State is a travesty of justice as well as a miscarriage of justice, but the effect it has on that individual, their friends, their family and their community is enormous. Whatever we do, we need to make sure that cannot happen and that is why we have such a robust criminal justice system. It is why, even in the Special Criminal Court, which is a non-jury court, judges have found there was insufficient evidence to convict a person who in the popular mind is absolutely guilty. The whole point of having that court process is to sift through that evidence and separate the public opinion from the evidence and the evidential basis for arriving at a conclusion. I have faith that system can deal with systems like this, whether with juries or without. As important as it is to have a system that works, it is also important that we do not unnecessarily waste Garda time performing a function that could be done by this technology. The biometric data that can be processed by this algorithm, flawed or otherwise, will always be checked by a human being and second-guessed by a person whose reputation is on the line. I am not saying gardaí do not make mistakes, because of course they do. I am not saying the DPP's office does not make mistakes because of course it does. However, in order for this miscarriage to occur the FRT has to be wrong, the garda has to be wrong, the DPP has to be wrong and then the court, the jury and the citizens have to be wrong. It is a lot to expect all those things to come together and be wrong in one instance. We can get around that. The protocols and procedures are important but the technology is important for improving law enforcement and the work of An Garda Síochána.

Sentiment score: 0.04